Contents

I use the calculator function on my smart phone to figure out bill payments or anticipate paycheck amounts, mainly. But there was a time, years ago, when I did use a calculator for math class and standardized exams. It was essential to have one for a period in high school, and for my friends who pursued mathematics in college, they could be counted on to be carrying one in their backpacks. What use would a calculator with a 3D printed case and free, open source software have in the era of the smart phone? That’s a good question to ask since the LibreCalc is a new open source, programmable calculator with a downloadable design available now.

In keeping with its larger ‘Make in India’ pitch, the government has asked states to deploy an open source Linux-based operating system — meant to run official computers — called BOSS, an acronym for Bharat Operating System Solutions. This is being proposed as a ‘homegrown’ alternative to the Microsoft Windows operating system, which is the predominant OS in use across Central and state government computer systems, alongside other Linux variants such as Redhat and Ubuntu, as well as Android and Unix systems.

CONSUMER electronic devices are the star of the yearly International CES but this year’s show saw Linux playing a strong supporting role.

Many people don’t know it, but they’re already using Linux in their day-to-day lives by way of one of the most ubiquitous devices—the smart phone. If you use an Android phone, then you’re already using a specialized version of Linux—along with about 1.1 billion other folk who bought an Android device in 2014. (That, says market research company Gartner, compares to 262,615 iPads and iPhones sold in the same year.)

A number of products and developments at this month’s CES, however, extended the reach of Linux even further.

In Las Vegas, Panasonic unveiled the first smart TV to use the Linux-based Firefox OS as a platform for smart TV apps that users will be able to download from Mozilla’s Firefox Marketplace. Firefox OS isn’t the only Linux kid on the TV block, however, going up against LG’s webOS, Samsung’s Tizen and Google’s Android TV platform, which will be used by Philips, Sharp and Sony.

Despite my affinity for the Linux desktop, I’m still part of the Mac world, thanks to my wife and her preference for OS X.

As such, this means helping out with TimeMachine backups, software updates and handling anything that might happen to come up when she needs a hand. Much like one might find with the Linux desktop, left alone, the Mac does a pretty good job of just “working” and allowing its users to get their daily duties completed without much hassle.

In the past, I’ve heard rumors about folks coming from OS X to Linux and sometimes, even switching from Linux over to OS X. After all, users of both platforms tend to rely on the web browser as their primary software application.

However, I want to dive into the idea that a multitude of Mac users are switching to Linux. In this article, I’ll explain why multitudes of Mac users aren’t switching to Linux, and I’ll provide some specific exceptions on the occasions when they are.

Desktop

I’ve had the good fortune of having a Chromebook Pixel to work on for the last few months. And, despite what my preconceived notions told me, I’ve actually quite enjoyed working and living in ChromeOS on a day-to-day basis.

But, I’m a nerd. And nerds need to tinker, which means that I needed to try every possible method of running “traditional” (i.e. “not ChromeOS”) Linux distributions on this laptop as humanly possible. Here are the three methods currently available and my experiences with them.

First and foremost: Installing Linux directly on a Chromebook and wiping out ChromeOS.

Jeff Bezos is a snowy white beard and an arctic fulfilment depot away from being crowned a living Santa Claus, with his Amazon retail empire once again placing itself at the centre of holiday shopping in the US.

Server

Docker’s security gets a mainly clean bill of health in a new study – despite some reservations about the maturity of this aspect of the open-source container technology.

Depending on the use case and the controls required, Linux containers are mature enough to be used as private and public platform as a service, according to Gartner – even though in mixed environments, involving multiple trust levels, security zones or potentially hostile tenants, additional safeguards such as SELinux will be needed.

The Paris Observatory has confirmed that on the appointed day, atomic clocks will be programmed to add in 11:59:60, in order to compensate for the idiosyncratic nature of the Earth’s orbit, caused by the gravitational pull of the moon, after consultation with the city’s International Earth Rotation Service.

It’s been a while since last having anything to report on the Lima graphics driver as the project by Luc Verhaegen to provide a open-source, reverse-engineered ARM Mali driver. While it’s been a while, it seems Luc is still working on the driver — or what he’s now calling the “Tamil Driver” as the Lima driver for ARM’s Mali T-series hardware.

While OpenChrome and the VIA DRM/KMS driver hasn’t seen much public activity in quite some time and appears rather dead, apparently that’s not the case. A new VIA OpenChrome Gallium3D driver was published this week in its initial rudimentary form.

Benchmarks

One of my big highlights of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week was Lenovo’s launch of the Broadwell-based X1 Carbon ultrabook/laptop… It looks like the best ThinkPad in years! Many others seem to also think this new X1 Carbon is a winner, and with being one of the first Broadwell designs available in the US, is going to be benchmarked shortly on Phoronix.

With the Linux 3.19 kernel stabilizing nicely, here’s a first look at the open-source AMD Radeon graphics performance using this new kernel that will be officially released in the weeks ahead. The Linux 3.18 kernel was compared to the latest Git code of Linux 3.19 for several different AMD Radeon HD series and Rx 200 series graphics cards.

Applications

The latest image format that’s been trying to unseat JPEG as the dominant web image format is BPG. While there’s still patent concerns over Better Portable Graphics as it’s based on the intra-frame encoding of H.265/HEVC, VLC has picked up BPG decoding support.

LaTeX is a high-quality document preparation system and document markup language which was written by Leslie Lamport. It is a very mature system and has been in development for more than 20 years. It includes features designed for the production of technical and scientific documentation.

Back in 2010, Kyle Rankin did an incredible series on Linux Troubleshooting. In Part 1, he talked about troubleshooting a system struggling with a high load. At that point, I’d already been a system administrator for more than a decade, but it was the first time I’d ever heard of iotop.

Why are we doing ACPI on ARM? That question has been asked many times, but we haven’t yet had a good summary of the most important reasons for wanting ACPI on ARM. This article is an attempt to state the rationale clearly.

Wine (Wine is not an emulator) 1.7.34 has been released and is packed with quite a few important improvements, besides the regular changes that are made to support applications and games from the Windows platform.

Games

The Metro bug was reported last month but so far the issue has yet to be fixed, even though it should be relatively straightforward bug. 4A Games should be aware of the issue and I’ve also relayed it through my Valve contacts. However, in the meantime I’ve been working with Lauri Kasanen to get libframetime working for these games.

With the numerous Linux graphics driver/hardware benchmarks done at Phoronix each week, one of the frequent requests is to use more popular Linux game titles available via Steam than the current selection of Linux game tests and OpenGL tech demos.

Gates of Horizon is a new space MMORPG that was released recently, it is developed with Unity3D and already has a client for Linux (and Mac and Windows as well of course) it is also about to release its Android and iOS clients soon.

At this week’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas there are no big Steam Machines announcements but just much talk about the state of affairs for Valve and their Steam Machines and SteamOS projects.

Desktop Environments/WMs

This highly-configurable GPLv2 window manager is out with a new version, but it mostly comes down to fixes and smaller work items. Awesome is still dependent on X11 and it doesn’t appear there’s any visible work at this point in porting it to become a Wayland compositor, etc.

The current developer branch allows users to create SEPA credit transfers, store and send them — thanks to aqBanking (website is in German). Some basic features are available already, so the IBAN is validated and you get suggestions for BICs. Also an address book of account numbers was added to the payees. But that is not used for auto-completion, yet.

Using the View -> Group Images -> By Format command, you can group photos in albums by format. This feature can come in useful for managing albums containing photos in different formats: JPEG, TIFF, RAW and video files, etc.

There was a time when new Linux distributions popped up on what seemed like a daily basis. They came and went so fast, you might have completely missed their short lives. That’s not so much the case these days. Linux distributions arrive a bit less frequently and, when they do finally arrive, tend to have a bit more staying power.

Why is that? My guess would be that the stable of standard distributions has become so strong, it’s hard for competition to stand up to the likes of Ubuntu, Arch, Mint, Fedora, SUSE, and Debian. That doesn’t mean, however, that new distributions don’t try to take down the mighty standard bearers. In fact, there are a few distributions that could give those kings and queens of Linux a run for their money this year. Which ones, you ask? Let’s take a look at what I believe will be the distributions to watch in 2015.

Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens… oh, no, sorry, that’s the wrong list. Ah, ok, here is the correct one: not six, or ten, or some other arbitrary number, just a list of some of my favorite things in Manjaro Linux.

For some, food and the act of eating are merely about sustenance. That mindset is antithetical to the way I approach gastronomy. That said, when Soylent hit the crowd funding scene, I was intrigued. And I wasn’t the only one. They had over $2M in pre-orders using Tilt and have since raised roughly 1.5M from venture capitalists.

Screenshots

Red Hat Family

The memory subsystem is one of the most critical components of modern server systems–it supplies critical run-time data and instructions to applications and to the operating system. Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides a number of tools for managing memory. This post illustrates how you can use these tools to boost the performance of systems with NUMA topologies.

[...]

Until Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, optimizing NUMA memory management was a manual process; a process best left in the hands of experts. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 broke new ground with the inclusion of an automatic NUMA balancing feature that achieves results close to what a performance specialist could provide.

Red Hat achieved its latest successful FIPS 140 validation back in April 2013. Since then, a lot has happened. There have been well publicized attacks on cryptographic protocols, weaknesses in implementations, and changing government requirements. With all of these issues in play, we want to explain what we are doing about it.

The upcoming OpenShift 3 release will integrate Docker and Google Kubernetes as the basis for Red Hat’s cloud platform as a service.
Red Hat is developing a new milestone release of its OpenShift platform-as-a-service (PaaS) technology that will shift the platform to Docker containers and Kubernetes orchestration.

Fedora

The Fedora ARM Team is pleased to announce the release of Fedora 21 for AArch64, ready to run on your next generation servers. Fedora 21 is a game-changer for the Fedora Project, and we think you’re going to be very pleased with the results. The Fedora 21 AArch64 release includes a bootable DVD, net installation media, and an installation tree.

It’s raining Droplets! Fedora 21 has landed in Digital Ocean’s cloud hosting. Fedora 21 offers a fantastic cloud image for developers, and it’s now easy for Digital Ocean users to spin it up and get started!

Debian Family

The Debian project is pleased to announce the eighth update of its stable distribution Debian 7 (codename “wheezy”). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories were already published separately and are referenced where available.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

Ubuntu Touch is a new operating system made by Canonical for mobile devices like phones and tablets. The only supported platforms are Nexus 4 and Nexus 7, but it looks like developers now have an easier time to make it work on other platforms, such as the Lenovo ThinkPad 8 with Intel processor.

Canonical has published details in a security notice about a Exiv2 vulnerability in Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn) that has been found and corrected. This not a major issue, but users should upgrade nonetheless.

The adoption of systemd in Debian has caused quite a ruckus, but it has other ramifications. For example, Ubuntu will soon use systemd by default, most likely in Ubuntu 15.04. The community has put together a great wiki page that explains the differences between upstart and systemd and how you use it right now.

Ubuntu developers added a new feature called locally integrated menus for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and it was extremely well received. In fact, some users have been asking for some refinements and it will be improved in the near future.

The Ubuntu Touch platform has a number of applications that have been developed specifically for this platform, but they are actually working on the desktop as well. The same is true for the Music app, which already looks great.

Ubuntu Touch already has a good selection of apps and more are added everyday, but it looks like Will Cooke from Canonical managed to get the Writer tool from LibreOffice to run on a phone. This opens up a wealth of opportunities.

Flavours and Variants

Xfce is one of my all-time favorite Linux desktops. So I’m always happy when a new release of it is available for Linux Mint. Yes, Linux Mint 17.1 Xfce has been released and you can download it today. This version of Linux Mint comes on the heels of the release of Linux Mint 17.1 KDE.

Days after the release of the KDE spin of Linux Mint 17.1 and more than one month since the MATE and Cinnamon Linux Mint 17.1 spins debuted, the group of Linux Mint 17.1 releases has ended with the availability of the Xfce version.

Unlike many Linux developers, he doesn’t earn his living in the software business — not entirely anyway. He’s a mathematician by trade, who pays his room and board as an adjunct faculty member teaching mathematics at ITT Technical Institute in Springfield, Illinois.

Linux Mint 17.1 “Rebecca” Xfce has been announced by the Linux Mint team and is now ready for download. The makers of this distro have finally finished the work for this particular flavor of the distribution.

The overall Linux performance depends on the amount of system resources your desktop environment is using. Lightweight desktop environments such as LXDE consume less resources, and are ideal for older computers that can’t keep up with heavier Linux desktop environments.

SmartThings debuted a 2nd generation home automation hub that moves to Linux, and adds new sensors, battery backup, optional cellular, and premium services.

Prior to Samsung’s acquisition of SmartThings last August, the company told us its next-generation home automation hub would likely move from an embedded RTOS (real-time operating system) to Linux. A SmartThings rep now tells us the newly announced second-generation SmartThings Hub does indeed run Linux. Not so surprisingly, consider the Samsung acquisition, the rep also said “We will be moving to Tizen over time.”

One of the coolest demos at CES 2015 was the AscTec Firefly drone demo at Intel’s big IoT extravaganza. Intel CEO Brian Krzanich joined several members of the Ascending Technologies team to play a drone version of Pong in which they paddled the hexacopter away by simply by moving toward it. The trick is enabled by the hexacopter’s six Intel Realsense 3D depth cameras combined with advanced inertial sensor and fusion algorithms running on an onboard Ubuntu Linux driven computer.

Samsung announced at last week’s International CES a new line of smart TVs powered by the open source Tizen operating system. Beginning with this year’s models, all of Samsung’s smart TVs will run on Tizen.

Samsung has taken the lead in developing Tizen, which is a derivative of Linux, and this is its first deployment as a smart TV platform. Tizen supports the Web standard for TV app development.

We saw a number of companies launch apps for video stabilization in the last year — including Instagram’s Hyperlapse for iOS — and Apple brought stabilized video to the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus camera. Now, Imint wants to do something similar for Android phones with the launch of Vidhance Mobile. Before you get too excited, though, it’s worth noting that Imint isn’t launching an Android video app. Instead, the company plans to work with phone manufacturers to integrate its algorithms right into their phones at the operating system level.

Are you one of those people who has admired Microsoft’s Surface hardware but bemoaned its operating system? Now you can do something about it. Chinese startup Jide has produced an eerily Surface-like tablet that runs a heavily modified version of Android 4.4, called Remix OS.

When is a console not a console? This is not an Eastern riddle; it’s the pitch behind the SlimPort Nano-Console. While the Nano-Console may resemble a small Android box, it’s actually something much cleverer: an HDMI box that makes your existing Android smartphone or tablet into a big-screen multimedia machine.

Now that 2015 is here and we are progressing through January nicely all eyes will be on all the manufacturers who made some bold claims just before Lollipop was released. The source code for Android 5.0 (Lollipop) was finally pushed out to the AOSP back at the start of November and in the couple of weeks leading up to this, quite a few of the big OEMs announced (quite consistently) that they would make Lollipop available to their flagship devices within ninety days of the release day. As the official release date was November 3rd, this means those who promised the ninety-day marker, should be pushing Lollipop out by February 3rd. Which we are quietly but now, quickly approaching.

Google has decided to end support for older versions of Android WebView, the default web browser on ‘droid devices. This will apply to users running 4.3 or earlier versions of its Android smartphone OS.

It has decided instead to invite securobods to fix the problem, saying it “welcome(d) patches with the report for consideration”…

Last year at CES LG released its G Flex, a device many thought designed as a display technology demonstration. It turns out the curved display is more than that as LG just announced the successor, the LG G Flex 2.

European carmaker Volkswagen has rolled out a massive amount of new technology at CES 2015 that will soon be standard fare on their cars and vehicles. One of these is MirrorLink, VW’s second generation “modular infotainment platform”, which integrates Android Auto (and Apple’s CarPlay) into its system.

The 2015 experience of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is wrapping up, and it was a pretty great event. We had a good portion of our team on the ground for the week, bringing you all the best that CES 2015 had to offer. With so much to discover and experience, we had to break apart our round-up of the show into several parts.

We always love reading about what happens when fans of one platform switch to another and our latest example comes to us from Ernest Oppetit, a product manager for marketing consultants QuBit Group who recently wrote about his experiences switching from Android to iOS on Medium. Unlike other longtime Android users who have had nice things to say about iOS, however, Oppetit says he “instantly” regretted his decision to switch to the iPhone 6.

Why has Lollipop only achieved less than a tenth of the Kitkat distribution? As with every version of Android, Google does not have a direct relationship with the customers’ OS. Any new version of the OS has to be passed to the manufacturers, who then tailor it to each handset and the individual SKU’s of that handset, which are then passed to networks for testing and certification, and then the system to push the over-the-air update to subscribers can begin.

After welcoming the new year, OnePlus wasted no time in releasing one update after another for their devices. The mobile manufacturer had an impressive showing in 2014 and they are looking to use that momentum to start 2015 with a bang.

The original Moto X is one of the best devices you can get on a budget and still bears some Google partnership so that updates should arrive in a timely manner. Even so, it seems that the Moto X Android update to Lollipop is still not available for download and the OTA hasn’t been sent out. That doesn’t mean that the Moto X 2013 won’t be getting the Lollipop treatment, it just means it isn’t finished yet.

Android Lollipop 5.1 update will launch for all the devices in February, way before the summer release that was slotted initially. The first device, to enjoy the Android Lollipop 5.1 update, will be Nexus. This update, users believe will be able to remove some of the problems that have already cropped into the operating system.

The AllSeen Alliance, a cross-industry collaboration created to advance the Internet of Everything (IoT) through the AllJoyn open source software project, has released the AllJoyn Gateway Agent, an extension of the AllJoyn framework that delivers remote access, device management and fine-grained security and privacy control.

Is history open source? Not always, it seems, as Jonathan Band recently pointed out in an essay about copyright and legal issues surrounding the reproduction of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speeches for the film “Selma,” which parallels the key debates about open vs. closed software.

Writing on Techdirt, Band observed that the producers of the film did not obtain the rights to King’s original Civil Rights-era speeches. Consequently, the speeches King is portrayed as giving in the movie are not those he actually delivered in the 1960s.

Events

For years, open source solutions have gained steam as programmers and decision makers began to see firsthand how they could benefit from the technology.

From a coder’s point of view, open source solutions provide a foundation upon which new pieces of software can be built rather than starting from scratch. From a business manager’s perspective, open source tools will likely cost the company considerably less than proprietary solutions while at the same time providing a high level of security and functionality.

One Direction has launched a denial of service attack on an open source coding conference in Cardiff, with the band maliciously pinging tens-of-thousands of its teenage fans at the city on the same day as DjangoCon 2015.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the CLS, it is an entirely free event designed to bring together community leaders and managers and the projects and organizations that are interested in growing and empowering a strong community. The event provides an unconference-style schedule in which attendees can discuss, debate and explore topics. This is augmented with a range of scheduled talks, panel discussions, networking opportunities and more.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

SaaS/Big Data

Implementing the cloud in your company is a major decision, and could be even more major than many other decisions about IT provision your company has made in the past.

Whereas client systems and servers are relatively generic, meaning you can switch vendors whenever the total cost of ownership provided by a new vendor makes it sensible to do so, a cloud provision can easily lock you into one vendor.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

This weekend when deciding what extra benchmarks to run and planning more tests for the week ahead, I decided to explore doing some fresh Oracle Solaris benchmarks since my most recent Solaris benchmarks were back in 2012. I also haven’t had much (any?) Solaris news to relay recently so wanted to see if there was anything new within the ex-Sun camp.

Germany’s third largest city has a long history of using open-source software, much of it well documented.

More than 16,000 PCs of public employees run the open-source “LiMux” Linux operating system, and the city makes heavy use of LibreOffice and its open file formats.

The city will be represented on the board by Florian Haftmann, whose appointment swells the ranks to 17 members, among them Google, Intel, RedHat, and MIMO (‘Inter-Ministry Mutualisation for an Open Productivity Suite’ and made up of various French governmental departments).

As of today within mainline GCC, the libgomp library, which up to now has been known as the GNU OpenMP Runtime Library, has been renamed to GNU Offloading and Multi Processing Runtime Library. This commit changes the name across the stack.

A maintenance release of RcppClassic, now at version 0.9.6, went out to CRAN today. This package provides a maintained version of the otherwise deprecated first Rcpp API; no new projects should use it.

The libjpeg-turbo library is an open-source JPEG implementation using SIMD instructions for accelerating JPEG compression/decompression on x86/x86_64/ARM platforms. The libjpeg-turbo library is known to be multiple times faster than the basic libjpeg and offer numerous extra features.

Licensing

The litigation surrounding Android continued this year, with significant developments in the patent litigation between Apple Computer, Inc. (Apple) and Samsung Electronics, Inc. (Samsung) and the copyright litigation over the Java APIs between Oracle Corporation (Oracle) and Google, Inc. (Google). Apple and Samsung have agreed to end patent disputes in nine countries, but they will continue the litigation in the US. As I stated last year, the Rockstar Consortium was a wild card in this dispute. However, the Rockstar Consortium settled its litigation with Google this year and sold off its patents, so it will no longer be a risk to the Android ecosystem.

The copyright litigation regarding the copyrightability of the Java APIs was brought back to life by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) decision which overturned the District Court decision. The District Court had found that Google was not liable for copyright infringement for its admitted copying of the Java APIs: the court found that the Java APIs were either not copyrightable or their use by Google was protected by various defenses to copyright. The CAFC overturned both the decision and the analysis and remanded the case to the District Court for a review of the fair use defense raised by Google. Subsequently, Google filed an appeal to the Supreme Court. The impact of a finding that Google was liable for copyright infringement in this case would have a dramatic effect on Android and, depending on the reasoning, would have a ripple effect across the interpretation of the scope of the “copyleft” terms of the GPL family of licenses which use APIs.

Open Hardware

It seems like everyone attending the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is lining up to try out virtual reality devices. At the forefront of the field’s development is Razer’s new open-source virtual reality (OSVR) platform.

It seems like everyone attending the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is lining up to try out virtual reality devices. At the forefront of the field’s development is Razer’s new open-source virtual reality (OSVR) platform.

Owners of the awesome Shapeoko 2 open source CNC machine that provides a 12 x 12 x 2.5″ work volume, has this month received new functionality via a new Laser engraving module that is currently over on the Kickstarter crowdfunding website looking to raise $20,000 in funding.

Programming

The plan for the upcoming release of Google’s Go 1.5 language is to have its tool-chain be written in Go. In order to bootstrap the new Go compiler tool-chain, they’ll depend on Go 1.4 to compile the new code.

Security

One example is the encryption featured in Skype, a program used by some 300 million users to conduct Internet video chat that is touted as secure.(3) It isn’t really. “Sustained Skype collection began in Feb 2011,” reads a National Security Agency (NSA) training document from the Edward Snowden archive.(4) Less than half a year later, in the fall, the code crackers declared their mission accomplished.(5) Since then, data from Skype has been accessible to the NSA snoops.(6) Software giant Microsoft, which acquired Skype in 2011, said in a statement: “We will not provide governments with direct or unfettered access to customer data or encryption keys.”(7) The NSA had been monitoring Skype even before that, but since February 2011 the service has been under order from the secret U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), to not only supply information to the NSA but also to make itself accessible as a source of data for the agency.(8)

The Internet of Things (IoT) was big news at the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and many of the biggest tech companies had related announcements. Apple wan’t demonstrating, but partners had the first set of devices that are HomeKit certified, which is Apple’s protocol for allowing smart home devices to work with the iOS platform. And, Google announced 15 new partners in “Work With Nest,” its developer program for adding third-party devices to Nest devices and networks.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

The protesters have hung banners on the perimeter fence of the Royal Air Force in Waddington, calling to stop launch and use of drones from the air base. They have pointed out civilian casualties caused by UAVs during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Four peace activists were arrested at a Royal Air Force (RAF) base in Lincolnshire, northern England, on Monday while protesting against Britain’s use of armed drones. The site hosts the control center for UK drones abroad.

Four demonstrators opposed to Britain’s prolonged participation in foreign wars and use of armed drones were arrested on Monday after cutting through a fence at the Waddington Royal Air Force base near Lincolnshire, UK.

According to the Guardian, RAF Waddington has been the growing focus of recent protests over Britain’s operation of unmanned aerial vehicles, which are controlled from the base.

“Behind the rebranding, war is as brutal and deadly as it has always been with civilians killed, communities destroyed, and the next generation traumatized. And so we have come to RAF Waddington, the home of drone warfare here in the UK to say clearly and simply ‘End the Drone War’.”

The group: ‘ End The Drone Wars’ were Pax Christi executive member Chris Cole, 51, from Oxford, Katharina Karcher, 30, from Coventry, Gary Eagling, 52, from Nottingham and Penny Walker, 64, from Leicester. They are currently in police custody.

Attacks carried out by alleged Islamic gunmen in France last week that left 17 dead were the work of the CIA, “designed to shore up France’s vassal status to Washington,” a former White House official has claimed.

Former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and editor of the Wall Street Journal, Paul Craig Roberts, wrote on his blog Thursday that the atrocities were a “false flag” operation, similar to those carried out after World War II to frame communists.

“Muslims are going to be framed for an inside job designed to pull France firmly back under Washington’s thumb,” he wrote.

The tragedy began when two heavily armed brothers burst into the Paris office of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo Wednesday, killing 12. The drama continued with the murder of a policewoman, and two concurrent sieges, one in a kosher supermarket.

One would be to create a mechanism to fully expose the situation. Some kind of international commission of inquiry, similar to the one that investigated North Korea, would be a good place to start. It could take testimony and build a record about the kingdom’s repression of dissent and the absence of rights for women. Just the discussion would signal to the Saudi leaders that, despite their storied relationship with the United States, abuses of human rights will not be forgotten, or ignored, as they have been for too long.

In response to the appalling attack on the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, the cry of Je suis Charlie (I am Charlie) has gone up in France, the rest of Europe and around the world.

The idea, of course, was been to express complete solidarity, to the point of total identification, with the slain journalists and their right to publish provocative and even offensive material. However, almost immediately a dissenting voice also emerged in western discourse, condemning some of the material and refusing to identify with it.

Helric Fredou, 45, suffered from depression and experienced burn out. Shortly before committing suicide, he met with the family of a victim of the Charlie Hebdo attack and killed himself preparing the report.

American Anwar al-Awlaki has been dead for over four years now, but The New York Times is still giving substantial ink to the U.S. government’s self-serving meme that Awlaki was an “operational” terrorist,” even though we still don’t know whether ISIS or AQAP is responsible for the recent attack on the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris.

I called out New York Times reporter Scott Shane for carrying the government’s water by pimping the “Awlaki was operational” narrative last year. Yesterday, Shane penned another lengthy article rehashing the U.S. government’s post hoc justification for targeting and assassinating Awlaki without due process.

On July 24, 2011, two days after Anders Breivik slaughtered 77 people, mostly teenagers, in Norway to call attention to his view that Muslim immigration was a bad thing, NBC’s Meet the Press didn’t mention the words “Breivik” or “Norway.” Nor did CBS’s Face the Nation.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

On Thursday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) offered a simple amendment to the controversial bill that would authorize construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline. Sanders’ measure, which he proposed to the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, would have declared it the “sense of Congress” that climate change is real; that it is caused by humans; that it has already caused significant problems; and that the United States needs to shift its economy away from fossil fuels.

Finance

Mitchell, a junior at the University of Michigan, owes $13,500 in federal student loans. Williams, a sophomore at Eastern Michigan University, has no clue how much she owes. Simon, a senior at Wayne State University, thinks he owes about $20,000, but isn’t real sure.

That range of knowledge about student loans is common, a new study has found.

The study, conducted by the Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings, found that about half of all students in the U.S. underestimate how much debt they have and less than a third can come within a few thousand dollars of the correct total. About a quarter overestimate their level of federal debt.

[...]

A little more than 14% of Michigan students who started paying off their student loans in 2011 are already in default, just three years after they left college. That’s more than 25,000 borrowers who haven’t made a payment in at least 270 days. The national default rate for the class of 2011 is 13.7%, down from 14.7% for 2010.

A special lottery is to be held to select the student who will live in the only deluxe room in a dormitory. There are 100 seniors, 150 juniors, and 200 sophomores who applied. Each senior’s name is placed in the lottery 3 times; each junior’s name, 2 times; and each sophomore’s name, 1 time. What is the probability that a senior’s name will be chosen?

A former Julius Baer banker acknowledged that he passed confidential client data to WikiLeaks but argued his actions were not illegal, as his trial resumed on charges of breaching Swiss banking secrecy law.

The trial of Rudolf Elmer, a self-described “Gandhi of Swiss tax law”, comes as banking secrecy in Switzerland is crumbling under international pressure from countries trying to recoup lost tax revenue.

An American “terrorism expert” on the right-wing Fox News channel has declared that Birmingham is “a totally Muslim” city “where non-Muslims just simply don’t go”.

Steve Emerson made the claim, which may come as a surprise to the hundreds of thousands of non-Muslim residents of Britain’s second-largest city, during a television discussion about no-go zones in Europe where Muslims are apparently in complete control.

Non-Muslims do not go to the British city of Birmingham, which has become a “totally Muslim” city, it has been claimed. Speaking on US news channel Fox News, Steven Emerson – who claims to be a “terrorism expert” – also said that gangs of religious police in parts of London beat up people who are not wearing Islamic clothes.

Censorship

You started out your entire narrative by outlining a Pakistani fanatic that wanted you dead for an offensive video. However, within Pakistan alone you censored over 1,773 pieces of progressive content. During the last half of 2013 and the first half of 2014, censorship on Facebook saw a 19% hike. Why is this relevant? Because the content you’re censoring in this country comes from left-wing liberal pages targeting extremism and oppressive state policies. On the other hand, pages with actual hate speech targeting both Muslim minorities and non-Muslims continue to push out their displaceable [perhaps you meant despicable] content with complete freedom and ease.

Pakistan desperately needs a counter narrative to tackle issues relating to extremism and terrorism. This is a country that feeds on conspiracy theories and not facts. When the murders in Paris first took place people began analyzing images to see how fake they could be, because everything is a conspiracy against religion, it causes no trouble or damage on its own. Do you see what we are living with?

As a result of government requests, Facebook removed 1,773 pieces of content in Pakistan in the first half of 2014, according to the company’s most recent transparency report. That trails only India and Turkey, where 4,960 and 1,893 pieces of content were removed, respectively, in the same time period.

Israel is planning to demand an apology for a controversial cartoon that appeared in the British Sunday Times, Israel’s ambassador to London said Monday, while one minister mulled steps against the paper.

Of course, freedom of speech has its limits. I was astonished to read from one of you that UK, as opposed to France, had laws forbidding incitement to racial hatred. Was it Charlie’s cartoons that convinced him that France had no such laws? Be reassured: it does. Only we do not conflate religion and race. We are the country of Voltaire and Diderot: religion is fair game. Atheists can point out its ridicules, and believers have to learn to take a joke and a pun. They are welcome to drown us in return with sermons about the superficiality of our materialistic, hedonistic lifestyles. I like it that way. Of course, the day when everybody confuses “Arab” with “Muslim” and “Muslim” with “fundamentalist”, then any criticism of the latter will backfire on the former. That is why we must keep the distinctions clear.

A prominent Dutch cartoonist at Charlie Hebdo heaped scorn on the French satirical weekly’s “new friends” since the massacre at its Paris offices on Wednesday.

“We have a lot of new friends, like the pope, Queen Elizabeth and (Russian President Vladimir) Putin. It really makes me laugh,” Bernard Holtrop, whose pen name is Willem, told the Dutch centre-left daily Volkskrant in an interview published Saturday.

France’s far-right National Front leader “Marine Le Pen is delighted when the Islamists start shooting all over the place,” said Willem, 73, a longtime Paris resident who also draws for the French leftist daily Liberation.

He added: “We vomit on all these people who suddenly say they are our friends.”

Commenting on the global outpouring of support for the weekly, Willem scoffed: “They’ve never seen Charlie Hebdo.”

In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris last week Haaretz published a daring cartoon juxtaposing journalists* killed in Gaza by Israel during the brutal summer slaughter with the journalists killed at the office of the satirical magazine in Paris. This set off a chain reaction which ultimately led to calls for murdering Haaretz journalists after Ronen Shoval, founder of the neo-Zionist and proto-fascist Im Tirtzu movement, called for an investigation of the newspaper’s editors. – See more at: http://mondoweiss.net/2015/01/journalists-publication-newspaper#sthash.qjHQxhhJ.dpuf

The British prime minister David Cameron has suggested that if his Conservative Party wins the upcoming general election, it will not allow encrypted communications that cannot be read by the security services.

On Sunday, Cameron told ITV News: “I think we cannot allow modern forms of communication to be exempt from the ability, in extremis, with a warrant signed by the home secretary, to be exempt from being listened to. That is my very clear view and if I am prime minister after the next election I will make sure we legislate accordingly.” He repeated the sentiment again on Monday (video embedded below.)

European Council President Donald Tusk will press EU lawmakers next week to drop their objections to states sharing airline passenger data as part of efforts to tighten security after the attack on Paris newspaper Charlie Hebdo.

Speaking in Latvia on Friday, the former Polish prime minister who now chairs meetings of EU leaders, said he had discussed the response to the attack with French President Francois Hollande and would put the matter on the agenda of the next scheduled summit in Brussels on Feb. 12.

Although the government’s warrantless surveillance program is associated with the National Security Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has gradually become a significant player in administering it, a newly declassified report shows.

In 2008, according to the report, the F.B.I. assumed the power to review email accounts the N.S.A. wanted to collect through the “Prism” system, which collects emails of foreigners from providers like Yahoo and Google. The bureau’s top lawyer, Valerie E. Caproni, who is now a Federal District Court judge, developed procedures to make sure no such accounts belonged to Americans.

Following the terrorist attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris, everybody and their brother have come out in support of freedom of speech. The problem is, they don’t even know what it is when asked. Meanwhile, the surveillance services waste no time in trying to use the attack to claim more powers.

The European Parliament’s legal advisors have issued a report into the repercussions of last year’s ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union, in which the CJEU struck down the E.U. Data Retention Directive. And the lawyers’ opinions suggest that surviving national data retention laws are on shaky ground.

In the wake of this week’s terrorist attacks in Paris, which began with the killing of 12 people at the offices of satirical publication Charlie Hebdo, the interior ministers of 12 EU countries have called for a limited increase in internet censorship.

President Obama on Monday called for federal legislation intended to force American companies to be more forthcoming when credit card data and other consumer information are lost in an online breach like the kind that hit Sony, Target and Home Depot last year.

President Obama on Monday unveiled a series of new bills designed to ratchet up cybersecurity protections in the wake of a massive data breach at Sony Pictures, warning the growing problem of online attacks “costs us billions of dollars.”

Where should you focus your online marketing efforts during 2015? In previous year’s campaigns on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites would have been high up on the priority list. Thanks to new policies and a need to maximise their own revenue, everyone should be wary of handing over control of the conversations to the likes of Facebook and Twitter. This year should be the year you take back control of the conversation.

[...]

Imagine if the marketing budgets for the Facebook Pages had been spent on bringing the audience to a property that was under the complete control of a brand. It might seem old-fashioned in a world of social media and user-created content indexes, but if these consumers had signed up to an email newsletter a year ago, the brand would still have that direct one-to-one relationship today, there would be no reliance on a mysterious traffic algorithm showing the content, and no extra budget would have to be spent to promote the message to try to get it read.

I personally use Facebook, but many of the posts that I make are actually mirrors of the posts I make on my personal blog. With years of links, comments, and thoughts, my personal blog belongs to me, is under my control, and I have all the data of the posts, and the readers eyeballs, for my own use.

The Motorola Moto E (model: XT1021 and related devices) is an affordable modern Android cellphone. It may be purchased in cash at your local MediaMarkt for around 100 Euros. It is easy to modify for your everyday surveillance detection, counter-surveillance and anti-surveillance needs. This phone is popular as it is compatible with SnoopSnitch. Nearly full information about the chips used on the phone are available. A high resolution tear-down image of the mainboard is floating around as well.

The July Revolution comprised three days of fighting in Paris, primarily on free speech grounds against state censorship. Charles X, France’s last hereditary monarch, had imposed the death penalty for blasphemy against Christianity. He also suspended the liberty of the press and dissolved the newly elected Chamber of Deputies.

Today, the column is used as a platform for surveillance cameras. We must be on our guard against similar repurposing today.

The Joint Committee on Human Rights has today published a report providing legislative scrutiny of the Counter Terrorism and Security Bill. In November last year we provided a breakdown of what was going to be contained in the Bill and our initial analysis.

Civil Rights

January 11, 2015 marks the two-year anniversary of Aaron Swartz’s death. The Reddit co-founder took his life at age 26, at a time he was ensnared in a legal battle that could have cost him $1 million and up to 35 years in prison if convicted.

Badawi, who is thirty, ran a Web site called Saudi Liberal Network, which dared to discuss the country’s rigid Islamic restrictions on culture. One post mocked the prohibition against observing Valentine’s Day, which, like all non-Muslim holidays, is banned in Saudi Arabia. (Even foreigners aren’t allowed to buy trees for Christmas.) Religious police, known as the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, have reportedly patrolled flower shops and chocolate shops to warn against selling items that commemorate an infidel celebration. The Web site scoffed, “Congratulations to us for the Commission on the Promotion of Virtue for teaching us virtue and for its eagerness to insure that all members of the Saudi public are among the people of paradise.”

Saudi blogger Raif Badawi has received the first 50 lashes of public flogging out of 1,000 for “insulting Islam” via an online forum that he launched. Jailed for ten years in prison, he faces over $200,000 fine.

While it should be blatantly obvious that the attackers’ actions in no way represent a religion of roughly 1.6 billion people, Murdoch’s 140 character analysis clearly failed to grasp even the basic idea that an entire religion cannot be blamed for these attacks.

An Egyptian court has sentenced a 21-year-old student to three years in jail for insulting Islam after police discovered he declared his atheism on Facebook. The young man had been harassed for his atheist views and had his own father testify against him.

Karim Ashraf Mohammed Al-Banna was tried in Idku city in northern Egypt. The student was arrested last November when he came to police to file a harassment complaint. It was revealed that Al-Banna was harassed in public for announcing he was an atheist online.

The government lie that claimed David Hicks committed any crime is now done and dusted, officially.

Hicks was, and is, innocent of any crime he has been charged with.

The lie that he was a terrorist who had committed a crime was promoted by the Howard government, notably Prime Minister John Howard and Attorney-General Philip Ruddock, and by the Pentagon and US Administration. It has been perpetuated by the Abbott government, notably by AG George Brandis. But all their claims have now been officially admitted to be false and wrong in law.

David Cameron is to meet with UK security chiefs on Monday to discuss whether Britain will give greater powers to its police and spies in the wake of the Paris terror attacks.

The Prime Minister said there were “things to learn” from the wave of violence that saw 17 killed across northern France from Wednesday to Friday – and he has faced pressure to revive the so-called “snooper’s charter” that would make it easier for GCHQ to monitor online communications.

Ill with flu last week, I watched the events unfolding in Paris with dread, rage and disbelief – feelings that surge every time there is an Islamicist atrocity. To kill so many over line drawings or as an expression of religious zeal? What drives these fanatics? In normal circumstances, I would have been on TV and radio channels providing immediate responses, soundbite explanations. Bedbound, I had time to reflect more deeply on this carnage and the question of freedom: what it means, how precious it is and how fragile. That fundamental human impulse and right has now become one of the most volatile and divisive concepts in the world today.

A freelance journalist for a local online news site was arrested Thursday while covering a motor vehicle crash, after he refused to turn over his camera to a detective from the Ocean County Prosecutor’s Office.

Andrew P. Flinchbaugh, 23, of Lacey, working for The Lacey Reporter, was charged with obstructing administration of law, which is a disorderly persons offense. He was taken into custody after he was repeatedly ordered by a detective to turn over the camera so whatever pictures or video Flinchbaugh had captured could be reviewed as potential evidence in the crash investigation.

“This is not a negotiation. Do I sound like I’m negotiating with you?”

When you hear those words spoken by a police officer, their intention seems unmistakable. They mean: “Do what I tell you or I’ll arrest you.”

This, indeed, is what happened when 23-year-old Andrew Flinchbaugh filmed the aftermath of a single-vehicle accident in Ocean County, N.J.

Flinchbaugh, who has contributed in the past to a local news Web site, claims he was given permission to film by those first on the scene. However, one police officer seems to have taken exception to Flinchbaugh’s presence.

So when we in the west who are not adherents to Islam speak of “Muslims”, who are we talking about? We are doing the same thing my acquaintance in the Levant did; taking countless unfamiliar people who we consider “different” and tagging them with a word that doesn’t mean much to us but does allow the application of a stereotype.

More than that, it’s a bad stereotype. Just like calling everyone in the western world “Christian”, I have a problem with the attribution of any motive or collective responsibility to the 1.6 billion people who actually are Muslims, or of a unified strategy by the 49 countries where they are the majority, let alone to the others caught up in the stereotype’s dragnet (many of whom are in fact Christians, as well as other religions).

When WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange released his latest document trove—more than 250,000 secret State Department cables—he intentionally harmed the U.S. government. The release of these documents damages our national interests and puts innocent lives at risk. He should be vigorously prosecuted for espionage.

DRM

The EFF has produced a new mobile app that allows users to access its alert center and instantly take action on issues pertaining to digital rights and other areas the group focuses on. And, it’s Android-only, because the EFF took a long look at Apple’s walled garden and said, “Include us out.”